Between the heady aroma of meat and spices, the sizeable hunk of Berkshire prosciutto clamped tightly in a vise, and the varied salumi hanging from the ceiling, the curing room at Mark McEwan’s brand new restaurant Fabbrica has a decidedly macho feel about it, and the Toronto chef jokes that it’s his "’Old Spice’ moment."
Open since the first of October, Fabbrica joins One, Bymark, and North 44 in the McEwan lineup and represents the French-trained chef’s take on rustic Italian fare, from Neapolitan-style pizzas and handmade pastas, to sweetbreads and bistecca, to classic dolci such as panna cotta and tiramisu. The menu was developed over a six-month period with Drew Ellerby, who’s the executive chef at One and is overseeing things at Fabbrica in the early going.
"I’ve always had a love affair with the Italian kitchen,” McEwan explains to CityLine.ca in a recent interview at the restaurant. “[My wife] Roxanne and I would go to Italy often, probably our favourite go-to place. My daughter did her first year of university there at the NYU campus in Florence. I’ve always had this great attachment to it, so I wanted to do a restaurant that was authentic Italian — regional, you go to Rome, you go to Florence, you dine in the spots where the locals eat. I wanted to be true to form on that [and] I believe we’ve done that.”
Located directly across from McEwan’s gourmet food store at the Shops At Don Mills, Fabbrica (which means ‘factory’ in Italian) was designed by Ralph Giannone of Giannone Patricone Associates and although the front room, bar area, and main dining room are all beautiful to behold, the eye immediately travels to the imported-from-Naples wood-burning oven, cloaked in a bolted metal façade. Serious business — but then we’re talking about pizzas that cook at 700 degrees for 90 seconds.
"Simple oven, same construction as it was 100 years ago," McEwan notes. "When you look at this style of pizza, it’s a slightly softer crust, has a little bit of chew to it, a bit of salt, almost a bit of sourness, and then perfectly dressed with simple toppings. That is, in essence, a pizza. Good olive oil, you’re done."
Though he’s had his share of excellent pizza in Italy, it was a pie at New York City’s Keste that gave McEwan pause for thought. He found out that chef and co-owner Roberto Caporuscio heads up the Associazione Pizzaiuoli Napoletani (which seeks to preserve the Neapolitan pizza tradition) so promptly sent his executive chef Rob LeClair down there for two weeks to study traditional pizza-making.
"[Roberto] worked him like a slave for two weeks, from wood, to maintenance of the oven, to cleaning, to slicing, dicing, making the dough. Rob found all the ingredients that we needed to duplicate that quality. You don’t realize how much work pizza is," McEwan muses.
Many of those ingredients are imported straight from Italy, including the Caputo pizza flour, San Marzano tomatoes, dehydrated salt, burrata and buffalo mozzarella. The aforementioned salumi comes from a local artisan producer who feeds his animals figs, parsnips, apples and cabbage.
The menu underwent a number of changes before McEwan was happy with it — he says the initial incarnation wasn’t adventurous enough. Now it includes "some really interesting old-school items that might frighten people a little bit, like bone marrow, goat, calves’ brains, sweetbreads. Our crispy sweetbreads are to die for. I could eat them every day. I shouldn’t. But I could."
At the end of the day, McEwan says Fabbrica is about good, simple food.
"This is sort of a homecoming for me," he smiles. "You spend 30 years learning the career and then you wind up making pizza again."